Disruptive Innovation: The Christensen Collection (The Innovator's Dilemma, The Innovator's Solution, The Innovator's DNA, and Harvard Business Review article "How Will You Measure Your Life?") (4 Items)

CHAPTER FOUR What Goes Up, Can’t Go Down

It is clear from the histories of the disk drive and excavator industries that the boundaries of value networks do not completely imprison the companies within them: There is considerable upward mobility into other networks. It is in restraining downward mobility into the markets enabled by disruptive technologies that the value networks exercise such unusual power. In this chapter we will explore these questions: Why could leading companies migrate so readily toward high-end markets, and why does moving downmarket appear to have been so difficult? Rational managers, as we shall see, can rarely build a ...